Philip Glenister in Mad Dogs, Sky1, review

I was worried about Mad Dogs (Sky1) – specifically, that I wouldn’t be manly enough for it. Frankly, it looked like the kind of macho drama series that would kick sand in the face of a wimp like me. And I speak as one who spent three years working at a lads’ magazine, for which I interviewed topless models (they weren’t actually topless while I interviewed them – that would have been distracting) and, in one charming picture story, rode a rollercoaster naked. (In fact I wasn’t completely naked; for some obscure health and safety reason, I had to keep my socks and shoes on. And if there’s a vision more pitiful that a puny, porridge-white wimp naked, it’s a puny, porridge-white wimp naked except for his socks and shoes.)

Even to a veteran in the realm of lads’ mag oafishness, though, Mad Dogs seemed intimidatingly male. Publicity photos showed Philip Glenister, Max Beesley, John Simm and Marc Warren, all pastmasters at robustly blokey roles, swaggering through Spanish sunshine in shades, presumably on some sort of middle-aged yobs’ holiday: a bird-fest, a burping booze-athon, a spicy, suffocating armpit of masculinity.

But it wasn’t quite like that – at least, not for long. The four leads’ characters, old friends, had flown to Majorca to visit a fifth old friend (Ben Chaplin), who’d struck it rich and retired young to a spectacular villa. The four were mystified as to how he’d done it, although not quite as mystified as they were when, on the first night of their stay, they spotted a dead goat floating in his swimming pool.

How did it get there? Also: at whom, late on the second night, was the villa owner screaming down the phone? Why, the next day, did he casually reveal he’d bought the villa in the names of these four old friends? Whose was the yacht he then drunkenly stole? And what did any of it have to do with the opening scene – a “flash-forward” that had shown each of those four friends in turn staring out of the screen at us and muttering cryptically, the faces of three of them flecked with blood?

This is what Mad Dogs did well – like any competent suspense thriller, it made you ask questions throughout. The episode bubbled with foreboding, right up to the cliffhanger in the villa’s kitchen, when a stranger materialised from the shadows, growled something in Spanish, and shot the villa owner in the head. (The most disturbing sight wasn’t the shower of blood but the gunman’s rubber mask, which was of a grinning Tony Blair.)

Straight after, we were shown taster clips of episode two, which appeared to suggest that Mad Dogs is going to turn into Danny Boyle’s 1994 film Shallow Grave – i.e., the main characters are going to keep quiet, bury the body and pretend the dead chap never existed.

I hope it isn’t a rip-off. If you could cope with its uncompromising maleness (so far we’ve met only one female character, whose sole actions were to have sex with one of the men and then pad around the villa in her knickers), episode one was enjoyably sinister. It was also, once or twice, quite amusing, in (of course) a blokey way. I particularly liked the scene in which they buried the goat.

“Do you think someone should say a few words?”

Pause.

“Goodbye, goat.”

Pause.

“Yeah, that should do it.”

While we’re on the subject of uncompromising maleness, 30 Rock (Comedy Central) contains the most uncompromisingly male character currently on TV. This Emmy-winning US sitcom, back for its fifth series, was created by a woman, stars a woman, and is in theory about a woman, yet it always ends up dominated by a man. Perhaps we’re meant to take that as a metaphor for society’s sexist inequalities. Or perhaps it just happens by accident, because Alec Baldwin can’t help out-acting everyone else in the cast.

The man Baldwin plays is Jack Donaghy, an executive at a television network and the boss of Liz Lemon (Tina Fey, 30 Rock’s creator). Jack is fat, sexist and seedy, and looks like a St Bernard sewn into a suit. But he is also, if you’ll forgive the switch from dog imagery to cat imagery, so purringly suave that he gets away with everything he does and says. “Lemon, I am not an ‘old’ dad. Fifty is the new 40 for men. Although 50 is still 60 for women.”

30 Rock is, as that line shows, very “written” rather than realistic: nobody in real life speaks as wittily as these characters do. Come to that, nobody in other sitcoms speaks as wittily as these characters do. 30 Rock is 82 episodes old and yet the quips still zip back and forth at the speed of a ping-pong rally. It would be tiring, if it weren’t so funny.